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I am setting up roles and responsibilities for the Mahara site of my work . These are the
roles that I am using:

·Site
Administrator: responsible for the whole site and the IT maintenance of
Mahara (networking, upgrades,etc)

·Institution
Administrators: The college has
several academic schoolsand I plan to
have at least one institution
administrator per academic school. They will be responsible for monitoring the appropriateness
of the contents for their students, approving requests for joining the
institution, suspending and reactive users, as well as performing all the
administration tasks for their institutions.

I also plan to use the role of “Institution
Staff”for each institution, as I
thought it may be helpful when the volume of students enrolled become high. However, I am testing the role with a mock
user, and I cannot see any differences
between being a“plain user” in the
institution or being promoted to “institution staff”.

Is there anything I am missing? We are
using Mahara 1.0.6, so I don’t know if the role of “Institution Staff” has more
privileges in the next versions.

It would be very insighful if you could share here how you are organizing
the administration of your Mahara sites.

As Heinz says, they're just like site staff, although what they can do is slightly different from what he says. The only thing they can do on top of normal users is create controlled groups (including putting people in those groups). They can assign tutors in these groups to release views that have been submitted for assessment.

Your use of the roles is pretty much how we use Mahara for MyPortfolio. Did you have something in mind that you thought someone like an institution or staff member could do?

At the moment, our Mahara site is not as big as
our Moodle site-which hosts around 4.000 users. However, as Mahara keeps
growing and growing, a very common question that worries our staff is: who is going
to monitor the "appropriateness" of the students' contents?... The UK
legislation is very restrictive in that sense, although I personally believe
that education should be based in trust, as the great educationist J.
Krisnahmurti stated, and not in punishment and fear.

At the moment, the Staff Administrators are
monitoring the contents of the students in their schools, but when the number
of students increases, it would be impossible for one person to do so, and perhaps
program coordinators/lecturers will have to take part in this “watchdog” task.

With the current role of “Institution Staff”, academic staff cannot
browse what students are uploading , unless students grant them access to their
views. On the other hand, having many staff administrators may lead to the
situation that they “overlap” each other.

I was wondering if perhaps, in future versions of
Mahara, tutors in a control membership group can log as their students –in the
same way that Moodle allows to do this with the Groups feature-, in order to
monitor students' work. What do you think?

With regard to the use of control membership
groups, in our current version of Mahara, the owner of the
group cannot enroll their students, and these last ones cannot either request
membership to the group. I believe that this point was already discussed in
another topic. I am therefore advising our institution administrators and staff
to use the “Request membership” and “Invite only” features for groups.

<<<With regard to the use of control membership
groups, in our current version of Mahara, the owner of the
group cannot enroll their students, and these last ones cannot either request
membership to the group.>>

Which version do you use? I checked in my 1.0.9 and 1.1rc2 versions and both work the same way.

The stuff user has the right to create a "controlled group". If you browse thru the user profiles you see a link "add to xxxxxx [pulldownmenu]] for the groups of this stuff admin. The release is the same. On the member page of the group you will find a link " Remove from group" next to the users name.

If your institution doesn't need controlled groups which allow to submit views to a stuff admin, your advice might me ok and makes the job for the stuff admin a little bit easier.

I was wondering if perhaps, in future versions of
Mahara, tutors in a control membership group can log as their students –in the
same way that Moodle allows to do this with the Groups feature-, in order to
monitor students' work. What do you think?

Maybe.. as a site option... It really does go against the grain of Mahara's private-by-default model though. Though I recognise that changing software is easier than changing dumb legislation!

I guess the best thing to do is file a feature request for now, and we can examine the feedback over time.

I echo Heinz's post - students aren't able to request membership to controlled groups by design, but the group owner should certainly be able to enrol users by going to their profile page and signing them u. We've talked about a UI for mass-adding users to controlled groups, but sadly we've run out of time to get something into 1.1...

I am currently setting up staff on Mahara. Is there a difference between the roles Site Staff and Institution Staff? We have one institution in our Mahara installation. Which role would you recommend I use to identify staff in Mahara?

Hi - if you have an institution set up, put your staff in that. In future, Mahara may do smart things like display on screen that users are 'staff in X institution', which you'll benefit from if they're in the institution.

From a functional perspective, right now they're identical. Staff members can create controlled groups.